Such inserts are generally of the replacable kind and are designed to be firmly held in an appropriate receiving seat formed in an insert holder. Thus, for example, the insert can be formed with a tapering wedge-shaped body so as to be wedge clamped within a correspondingly wedge-shaped slot formed in the insert holder. Alternatively, the insert can be clamped between a pair of jaws of the insert holder which jaws define a receiving slot, the jaws being biased into clamping the insert by suitable mechanical means.
Seeing that the metal cutting operations involve the removal (from the workpiece being cut) of metal, in the form of chips, the interests of safety and efficiency of cutting require that these chips be effectively removed from the cutting region. To this end it has long been known to provide such cutting inserts with chip breaking and/or chip forming means so as to ensure that the chips shortly after their formation, are so shaped and/or broken that they can be readily removed from the work area without interfering with the continuing cutting process and without endangering the operating personnel.
In the use of such cutting inserts for the purposes indicated, it has long been known to draw a distinction between tools for parting or grooving operations on the one hand, and tools for lateral turning (e.g. cylindrical) operations on the other hand. In the first instance, there is a radial movement of the tool into the rotating workpiece to be grooved or parted whilst, in the second instance, there is a lateral or transverse movement of the tool. When carrying out these differing kinds of operations, it has long been known that it is necessary to replace the holder and the cutting insert when passing from one operation to the other, seeing that the cutting insert employed for any particular operation is designed so as to meet only the requirements of that operation.
This necessity to replace the cutting insert in accordance with the nature of the cutting operation is clearly time-consuming and requires the ready availability of differing kinds of holders and cutting inserts for differing kinds of operations. In the light of this existing situation, the applicants have developed a new tool cutting system known by the applicants' trademark CUT-GRIP, wherein the same cutting insert can be used for both parting and grooving operations, on the one hand, and also for lateral turning operations, on the other hand. Such an insert will hereinafter be referred to as a "multidirectional cutting tool insert".
With the use of such multidirectional cutting tool inserts, the problem arises of effectively controlling the formation of chips whether these arose from radially directed parting or grooving operations or from laterally directed turning operations.